Monday, August 31, 2009

Today and tomorrow are among the busiest days of the year in Boston as students and young professionals move in and out of their Sept. 1 apartments. I know at least 20 people who are moving or who have recently moved, including my friend Paul, who moved into a building featuring a bizarre abbreviation/apostrophe catastrophe.

Apostrophes can indicate missing letters, so ap'tm's might be OK, but Aptm's strikes me as very odd. I don't know if I could live there!

Friday, August 28, 2009

I was hanging out with my friend Amy last night, and I brought up Apostrophe Catastrophes as we were looking at the menu, and sure enough, the menu contained a glaring grammatical error.

Firefly's web site makes the same mistake, among others. Incidentally, have you ever walked around Boston on a Sunday morning between 9 and 11 a.m.? There are very few early birds around; most people are still sleeping it off.

Grammatical errors aside, Firefly had excellent food. We had some delicious strawberry and spinach salad and spicy portobello mushroom pizza.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

So, apparently, Twitter wasn't working this morning, which caused all kind of chaos on the Internet, including apostrophe failure over at techcrunch.com.

Credit goes to Tom for sending the above screenshots and coining the phrase "grammar fail whale." In case you don't get the joke, it's clever Twitter humor. I still don't entirely understand what DDOS means, though.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Remember those Mattress Discounters commercials that said to "leave off the last 's' for savings"? Apparently, this mattress place in Aberdeen, Scotland, takes the opposite approach with its branding.

Thanks to Lorraine for sending this one in!

Public Service Announcement: Did you know that you can haggle when buying a mattress? It's just like buying a car. The sticker price of the mattress that I recently bought from Sleepy's was $1299, and I ended up paying $483 for it (plus delivery charge). Readers, it would be a catastrophe to pay too much for your next furniture purchase.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The Metropolitan Transit Authority is so complex. They are able to use semicolons correctly, but they don't know the difference between its and it's. See the last sentences of each of the blurbs below.

Thanks to my friend John (a.k.a. my friend Stephanie's fiance) for sending this one in!

About this Blog

If you find examples of apostrophe catastrophes or other punctuation errors, please e-mail them to apostrophecatastrophes [at] gmail.com. Feel free to include a link to your own website or blog if you want credit, but please don't send content that has been posted or submitted elsewhere.